Franco, Jamesin full James Edward Franco ( born April 19, 1978 , Palo Alto, California, U.S.American actor whose rakish charm and chiseled good looks augmented an ability to bring sincerity and gravitas to characters ranging from addled drug dealers to comic book villains.

The eldest of three children, Franco was raised in Palo Alto, California, by his mother, a children’s book author, and his father, a businessman. A strong student, Franco nonetheless dropped out of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), after his first year in order to pursue acting. While taking classes at Playhouse West in Los Angeles, he secured a series of roles in unremarkable television movies and forgettable teen fare. His casting as a cocky high-school slacker in the Judd Apatow-produced television series Freaks and Geeks (1999–2000)—later a cult favourite—brought him to wider attention.

It was, however, his performance as James Dean in the eponymous television movie (2001) that established him as a major talent. Franco’s evocation of that silver-screen idol won him a Golden Globe Award for best actor in a miniseries or television movie. As Harry Osborn, best friend to Peter Parker in Spider-Man (2002), a film adaptation of the comic book, Franco proved himself adept at shaping his talents to the broad sensiblities of the genre. He returned for two further installments of the franchise, Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007). Films including the crime drama City by the Sea (2002), the mythological retelling Tristan + Isolde (2006), and the World War I fighter-pilot drama Flyboys (2006), though poorly received, showcased Franco’s versatility.

While working his role as a jocular marijuana dealer for laughs in Pineapple Express (2008)—a stoner comedy costarring fellow Freaks and Geeks alumnus Seth Rogen, who collaborated on the screenplay with Apatow—Franco simultaneously evoked the character’s loneliness and disaffection. He won further praise as a lover of gay rights activist Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn) in Milk (2008) and as Allen Ginsberg in Howl (2010). His performance as a man forced to cut off his own arm after a climbing accident in 127 Hours (2010) earned Franco his first Academy Award nomination for best actor.

In 2011 Franco and actress Anne Hathaway cohosted the Oscar ceremony. Later that year he appeared in Your Highness, a bawdy comedy set in the Middle Ages, and in the big-budget science-fiction film Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Franco subsequently starred as the title character in Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), which imagined a backstory for the enigmatic wizard of popular literature and film. For Spring Breakers (2013), a portrait of youthful debauchery on the Florida coast, he transformed into a garishly styled drug dealer and rapper. He also appeared, as an exaggerated version of himself, in This Is the End (2013), an apocalyptic comedy codirected by Rogen. In Lovelace (2013), a biopic about pornographic film actress Linda Lovelace, Franco portrayed Hugh Hefner.

Styling himself as a latter-day Renaissance man, Franco was also a visual artist and a painter; he characterized his guest appearance (2009–12) as an artist named Franco on the daytime soap opera General Hospital as performance art. He directed, wrote, and starred in several films—among them The Ape (2005), the Hart Crane biopic The Broken Tower (2011), and an adaptation (2013) of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying—and he wrote short fiction, some of which was published in Palo Alto: Stories (2010). The novelistic Actors Anonymous (2013) spliced autobiographical episodes with imaginings of the lives of struggling actors in Hollywood.

Franco returned to UCLA, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing (2008), and he pursued a series of further degrees, among them a master’s in writing (2010) from Columbia University and a master’s in film (2011) from New York University.